


Swan Song

by Pearlheart04



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:13:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22858321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pearlheart04/pseuds/Pearlheart04
Summary: Charlie Swan is, for the first time in his life, in a state of complete and total shock. He can't move, can't make sense of his thoughts. He can hear his heartbeat against his sternum, can feel the pulse of it against his neck, he can hear the words coming out of the mouth of the woman from Child Services standing in front of him, but he can't make sense of them. He hasn't been able to make sense of anything since she informed him he has a daughter. A daughter who is almost sixteen years old. A daughter he never knew existed. A daughter who is most definitely not named Isabella Marie Swan.The fic in which not one, but two Swan girls end up in Forks, Washington. Charlie Swan, Edward Cullen and Forks as a whole will never be the same.
Relationships: Bella Swan & Charlie Swan, Bella Swan & Original Female Character(s), Charlie Swan & Original Female Character(s), Charlie Swan/Original Female Character(s), Edward Cullen/Bella Swan, Edward Cullen/Original Female Character(s), Jacob Black & Original Female Character(s), Jacob Black/Bella Swan, Renée Dwyer/Charlie Swan
Comments: 12
Kudos: 65





	Swan Song

Prologue

Forks, Washington was home to exactly one bar - if Molly McMinn’s Pub and Grille could even be called that. It wasn’t classy or hip or metropolitan. They didn’t serve cocktails or customized mixed drinks shaken by attractive young bartenders in revealing clothes. What Molly McMinn’s had was Molly and Bill, the older couple who owned the place, and their middle aged son Shane – with his receding hair line, pot belly, and crash sense of humor as he served drinks. You could get beer, cheap wine, and liquor chilled or neat. That was it. They didn’t have the best burger in town, but their kitchen stayed open the longest. You could play pool or darts and smoke out of the terrace. It was dimly lit and caked with a decade’s worth of grime and I-don’t-even-want-to-know stains. There was karaoke on Wednesday nights and live music on Fridays – which mostly consisted of local, struggling one to three people cover bands strumming acoustic guitars poorly and singing into the same microphone stand used for karaoke.

It wasn’t anyone’s definition of the “the place” to be. It certainly wasn’t Charlie’s wife’s – no, soon to be ex-wife’s ideal destination. But it was where he ended up after he was served the divorce papers. Renee - with her wandering spirit and her thirst for more, more, more - wanted to go out salsa dancing, to wine tasting or try out exotic drinks made with dry ice that smoked like some weird futuristic drink featured on Star Trek. Molly’s embodied everything that was wrong with Forks as a whole and Charlie in particular. It was too small, too provincial; nothing ever changed. The same people who were there last week would be there the following and worse, everyone knew everyone and everything about the next person. There was no excitement, no adventure, and no sense of the unknown.

Charlie never minded it. Well, not the town gossip part. He was at his core a quiet soul, fiercely private and independent. He always resented nosy, busybodies. But Forks was home and its people were generally well meaning. Even with its overcast skies, it’s dreary, rainy weather, its one bar and one movie theater and one church and one school and one dinner and one of everything really. It was comfortable, familiar, and above all else, home. A place with roots and stability; a place where you could get married, buy a house and raise a family that was safe and loved and warm in the midst of the rain.

None of this unfortunately appealed to Renée. Oh, it did at first. At first, Forks was quaint. Small town life as a new wife to the town’s youngest deputy and young mother to a beautiful baby girl was its own sort of adventure. And Renée attacked it with a vigor and scatterbrained love that she approached all of life with. For a while it was enough.

She loved Charlie, her quietly doting husband who was so different from her. He was her perfect foil in most ways, but he was also so so good, so stable and grounding. He loved in his own quiet way. Sure, she grew up fantasying about loud declarations of love. She dreamed of hearts, and roses and the “I can’t live without you” type of love that movies and books were made of, but this was good too. Her marriage was good, and Charlie for all his silences, for all his struggles to find the right words to express himself was so very passionate underneath it all. His smiles and laughs, though rarely given, light him up from within and were saved for Renée and Bella alone. And at first it was enough.

One year in, with a baby barely two months old and she felt like an imposter. Like she was play-acting the role of mother and wife. Everything around her dissatisfied her. Was this really it? Was this what her life was going to be like forever? She resented Forks and soon that resentment turned to hate. As much as she loved Charlie, she began to slowly resent him too. How could he be okay with just this? Had she changed? Did he always deliberately misunderstand her? Had he always been this stubbornly set on this small, insular dreary place? Maybe if they left – went anywhere else but here – they could salvage their marriage. Maybe a change of scenery could awaken what was there in the beginning; could cover the painful silences, the tense, passive aggressive arguments, the incompatibilities.

Maybe getting away from Forks could quiet the sense of dread settled deep in the pit of her gut every morning that she woke up. She didn’t know much but she knew she needed to get out.

And get out she did.

After that final, heart rendering fight. The kind of fight where love tangles with bitter hate and knowledge of a person becomes your best weapon – Renée packed exactly two bags, one for herself and one for Bella, and she left. And Charlie let her. The thing that seals it for her is his acquiescence; sure, he’d argued and hurled his accusations and even pleaded but he never budged. For all his claims of love, he never compromised and in the end, the final nail in the coffin, he let her go just like he did most things – quietly stoic even in his sorrow.

That first week away she thought he’d follow her. Despite all their angry, painful words she believed on some level that she’d wake up in Arizona with him on her doorstep, a packed bag and a hangdog expression. They’d have makeup sex and then continue their marriage in a sunnier place with the world and their new dreams ahead of them. The details of how they would work out escaped her; she was never one to focus on the details. It was the big picture she was drawn to, the idea. She was always an optimist about the idea of something. So when three weeks past and he didn’t show up her pain became anger - anger that led her to a divorce attorney; anger that eventually turn into resignation and divorce papers.

Charlie is first and foremost a realist where his wife is a dreamer.

He is honest to those he loves, to himself and to the reality of a situation. That’s not to say that he moves on easily, because he doesn’t, but at least he’s honest with himself about it. The one time this trait failed him was when it came to Renée: his beautiful, spirited but flighty wife. He thought she could be happy with him and their life in Forks. He lied to himself about it really because although he doesn’t always understand her, he does know her. They were both wrong in their assessment of their marriage, but where Renée is flighty she is also adaptable. And while she feels strongly, loudly and boldly, her feelings are often like a hot flash of flame in a pan – quick to ignite, burn and then dissipate. She can and she will move on, she assuredly will do so quicker than he will.

Charlie’s feelings are quieter, slower burning. There is a depth to them that is not readily visible to the outside viewer. He does not love or connect easily or quickly, but once he does love it is constant, long-suffering and lasting. So no, he is not surprised when a month after their explosive falling out and Renée and Bella’s sudden departure he’s served with divorce papers. He’s not surprised, he knew she wasn’t coming back; just as he knew he was not leaving, but it does shatter something deep within him that he feels ill equipped to repair. Not even a month and she’s done. It reinforces every deep-rooted insecurity he’s ever had about not being enough for the woman he loves. The fact that his baby girl is now out of his reach is a blow that settles like ice in his veins. Will she even know him when he sees her next? He’s never wanted to give his daughter a life plague by a broken home. But he refuses to be that stubborn asshole who tries to take a little girl away from the mother she needs. He won’t do it; Renée may not love him, but she loves Bella. A small part of him wishes he could get over her as easily as she seems to have gotten over him, another part desperately clings to his hurt because at least it proves their love – however fleeting on her end – was real.

The papers are what drive him to Molly’s. They’re why he’s traded in his regular beer for Jameson neat. He’d toyed with the idea of buying a bottle and finishing it in the solitude of his own home, but the thought was too depressing.

The idea of sitting in the house that Renée had so painstaking made a home, nursing a bottle of whiskey, thinking about the empty nursery upstairs and staring at the manila envelope from the law firm in Arizona citing irreconcilable differences as the cause for their divorce is more than he can endure.

It’s not until he finds himself seriously contemplating picking up the phone and begging Renée to return with their baby or grabbing his service glock and turning it on himself that he picks up his keys and heads to Molly’s for a night of reprieve. He’s giving himself one night and one night only to visibly and recklessly wallow. His depression is reaching new, scary heights and while it is not in anyway healthy, he’s going to get horribly drunk in an effort to quiet his demons. The kind of drunk he hasn’t been since he was an adolescent, rebelling against a strict, taciturn, unloving father figure.

He’s on double whiskey number three when he sees her.

Her name is Amara, he later learns after she boldly sits down next to him at the bar and asks him if he’s going to buy her a drink.

He does of course. Her tone is at once playful and seductive and he is two drinks too deep to refuse the question that is half request and half dare.

She’s driving through Forks, living out of an old Volkswagen that she converted into a pseudo RV. Her next stop on what she’s affectionately dubbed her “dive-bar tour of America” is Seattle.

Charlie knows she is just passing through in that same gut instinctive way he can I.D. a suspect. He understands this as soon as she sits down next to him. He’s a simple, small town boy but he’s always been perceptive. Forks and it’s youngest deputy won’t be more than a blimp on her journey. The knowledge, surprisingly, does not stop him from turning to her.

Amara is mesmerizing and mysterious. She is both interesting and talented – as he later learns once she picks up her guitar and saunters over to the mic for her set.

No one who looks like her - with her caramel skin, her long midnight dreadlocks that fall haphazardly to her waist, her high cheekbones and dark, glittering almond shape eyes - or sounds like her – there is a honesty to her voice as she sings along to the strumming of her guitar; it is at once husky and sweetly simple – stays in a place like Forks long. Amara is not one to make a place like this home. She doesn’t even seem to be looking for a place to call home. She is a wanderer much like his estranged wife, but it is not a searching type of wandering. She does not float from place to place, passion to passion or dream to dream with a sense of uncertainty. It is more an observational type of wandering. There seems to be a sense of surety to her movements. Perhaps not a surety in life and the world, but an assurance of self that is intoxicatingly attractive.

Charlie doesn’t think Renée ever fully settled on who she wanted to be. She was always in a state of searching and questioning and evolving. He spent their whole marriage waiting for the other shoe to drop; waiting for her to wake up and change her mind about their life together as she often changed her mind about everything thing else. Amara is confident. Or at least she appears that way at first meeting. She knows who she is, she knows what she wants and she is not afraid to voice those wants. It is a trait that is rare in most of their peers. And while she doesn’t seem inclined to ever stop exploring or feinting from place to place or man to man or stage to stage, the one constant is her sense of self.

She is effortlessly cool in a way Charlie can never be. Her beauty, talent, mystery and coolness aside, the first thing that draws her to him is her eyes. They are attractive but there is a knowing sadness to them as well. When she turns them on him at the bar he feels seen and flayed apart under that knowing gaze. Like to like. Pain to pain. Whatever she has done in life, she has known pain and heartbreak and she recognizes it in him without him saying a word.

“I like broken things,” she tells him flippantly when he’s just drunk enough and insecure enough to ask her why she’s interested in him.

He huffs out a truncated laugh in response, his lips upturned in one part amusement and one part self-deprecation.

They end the night back at his place.

He’s never been one for one night stands. He’s had two serious relationships his whole life. One in high school and one in college, and he ended up married to his college girlfriend. Charlie is at once intrigued and bemused by the current turn of events.

Amara is without a doubt out of his league. Renée was as well. They are apples and oranges but both are out of his ballpark. A small, vindictive part of him wonders what Renée would think if she knew that the day she served him with divorce papers, he ended up in bed with a singer-songwriter beautiful enough to be on a magazine cover, talented enough to get and reject a major record deal, and enviably cultured in a way that his wife longed for. He wonders if she would hurt like he was hurting. It’s a mean, petty thought that he fiercely tampers down on as soon as he thinks it. He was hurt and angry, but he didn’t want Renée to hurt; not really, he mostly just wanted her back.

One night with Amara turns into two and then into three, and before either of them know it they are doing whatever it is they are doing for two months. Amara drives to and from gigs at dive bars around the Northwest and when she’s off she finds herself and her Volkswagen parked at the Swan residence in Forks.

Charlie continues to live his life. He goes to works, finds a mediator to quickly and amicably hammer out a custody agreement with Renée and he eventually signs the divorce papers. He is not over Renée. He is not healed or fine or even okay but he is dealing. In between all this is Amara with her warm, husky voice and their whiskey fuel nights between sweat-soaked sheets and quiet morning as she strums her guitar and he has his morning cup of coffee.

Neither of them have any illusions about this lasting. Neither of them wants it to really. He’s not sure what or who she’s running from but there are times when she’s with him that he knows she’s remembering someone else. It’s a rebound relationship for them both, but it’s a reprieve more than anything else.

Charlie doesn’t love Amara. Not in the all consuming way he loves his wife. She intrigues him, he’s fond of her, and he finds comfort and peace with her. She is not a distraction. Calling her such would be a disservice to both her and what they share. Solace after a storm is the closest he comes to describing what they have. Amara quickly becomes a warm place to rest his fractured heart. She is similar to Renée in a lot of ways, but different enough that he doesn’t feel burdened by the ghost of his ex-wife.

The sex is fantastic. She makes him laugh with her dry, sarcastic sense of humor and she doesn’t have expectations of him. More than anything else he never feels as though she wants him to change.

On the quieter nights when he allows himself to feel guilty about using her as a placeholder, she is quick to remind him that she is using him too.

“Don’t make this something it isn’t, Charlie. Don’t feel bad about taking what you need to get through this shit. I never do.”

She’s always blunt with her honesty. It’s one of the things he likes and is most intimidated by.

He struggles with his words. He always has. She doesn’t mince hers. Nor does she pull her punches. For all her music lyrics are poetic and flowery, she isn’t in her day-to-day life. She is not cruel or thoughtless but she’s to the point. He’s never unsure of where he stands with her and after Renée that is it’s own comfort.

It’s not perfect; this half thing they have.

She’s vibrant and intriguing, but at turns moody and withdrawn. For all their sexual intimacy, he never feels as though he knows her. There are parts of her that no one will ever touch or know. Broken bits of herself and her past that will always be out of reach. She smokes too much weed – a fact that he politely and illegally ignores – and is messy beyond belief.

While their periods of quiet introspection align with each other’s needs, he is often incapable of expressing himself the way he means to. And the moment she needs space, she disappears. Sometimes for a night, sometimes for a week before she turns up to continue where they left off. It seems Charlie’s penchant for the rolling stone archetype will be a pattern rather than a one-off.

He isn’t what she truly wants either. Not in the long run. She’s too self-reliant and too selfish for that. She’s too wary of needing anyone, let alone a man. She’s made that mistake more than once, and won’t do it again.

But something within Charlie calms the broken bits within her. When she approached him at that bar, she fully intended it to a one night and done situation. But he surprised her as so few people are capable of.

He’s handsome in that small town, flannel boy-next-door type of way. He’s strong, but that gruff exterior hides a gentle man. He’s always so gentle with her when he needs him to be.

There is a depth to him that is attractive, despite the outward life that seems so pedestrian. He is not an extrovert or truly social being, but when you put him at ease enough to actually get him to talk, he is engaging with his brusque sense of humor and unexpected intelligence. He is quietly kind and shyly affectionate – which she find endearing.

What she can say about him is perhaps what most of Forks could say. He’s a standup guy, honorable and kind if too quiet and rough around the edges. What draws her back more than anything else is that there is no danger of truly falling in love with Charlie. There might be some attachment but not in anyway that can truly cause damage. He is still hung up on his ex-wife and Amara is too damaged to fully believe or want the white-picket fence type of life he craves.

The truth is she recognizes the type of heartbreak that one doesn’t really heal from. Charlie is strong, he will survive, but he will be affected by the implosion of his marriage for years to come. She knows his type. His is drawn to free spirits but he longs for dependability and a love that is at once constant and deep.

She is in no danger of breaking his heart. And though he is a good man, she is in no danger of having her heart broken in return. If her life and habits have taught her anything it is that she never, ever falls for good men.

Alcoholics, yes. Philandering musicians, yes. Intellectual and/or artistic misogynists yes and yes. Married men and abusive men, yes to both. But never good ones.

A therapist might be inclined to blame her deadbeat of a father – a white man to hung up on society’s and his family’s expectations of him to be a father to his half black daughter. She mostly blames her shitty taste. Here are two indisputable facts about Amara. One: she has excellent taste in music. Two: she has horrible taste in men. That will be engraved on her tombstone someday for sure.

The pseudo relationship that Amara and Charlie have lasts a little under three months.

Impressive for what should have been an uncomplicated one-night stand. It’s long enough for her to inject a bit of salacious gossip and small town intrigue about the young Deputy and the bohemian woman he’s shacking up with so soon after his wife and baby have left him. It’s long enough for her to attend exactly one fish fry on the Quileute Reservation with Billy Black and his wife Sarah. The Blacks don’t know exactly what to make of Amara and Charlie but they are just grateful to see him moving forward. It is long enough to have a quick, and awkward and purely accidental meet and greet with Charlie’s ex-wife and daughter when she came to town to finalize their custody agreement. It is also enough time for her to realize that it’s been two months since her last period.

She drives to Seattle. She’s too wary of the gossip wheel in Forks to risk buying a pregnancy test there. She chugs a gallon of water on the drive over and take the pregnancy test in a gas station bathroom. She takes deep breathes and sings the lyrics to House of The Rising Sun in her head to stave off the mounting panic while she waits for the results. Both sticks show her light pink plus signs.

The first thing she thinks is “Fuck!”

It’s the first thing she says aloud as well.

She gives herself five full minutes to panic and then she makes her decision like she makes all decisions in her life – abruptly, decisively and with her wants at the forefront of her mind. It is perhaps selfish. Selfishness is one of her fatal flaws, but it’s a selfish world and if she doesn’t put herself first no one else will.

She decides to keep the baby. She’s pro-choice and has been referred to as a liberal hippie by more than one person, but the thought of aborting doesn’t truly take shape in her mind. She wants this baby. She can’t articulate why in any logical way. Her lifestyle, career and habits are not conducive to raising a child but the draw she feels toward her unborn child is almost instinctive.

The second decision she makes – and this is perhaps the only decision she’s ever made that she feels acute shame over – is to not inform Charlie.

She can’t do it. They are not in love, but she’s come to care for him. He has quickly become a close friend in addition to her lover. She’s always been honest with him, but she can’t be honest with him about this. She was there when Renée handed him his daughter – not even five months old – Amara saw the love and loss shining out of his eyes as he chokingly commented on how much Bella had grown.

She can’t stay in Forks. She won’t. She also can’t face telling him that she’s having his child – another child that will be taken beyond his reach, another woman he is not enough for.

If she told him, Charlie would do the honorable thing. He’d ask her to stay, he’d ask her to marry him in that quiet way of his. He’d make room in his fragile heart for her and their child.

It is cowardly but also easier to just leave.

She doesn’t want to have to reject him. She doesn’t want to have to tell him that staying with him, playing house and raising a child with him would stifle the parts of herself that she fought tooth and nail to hone. She’s a piece of shit but she’s a self aware one at least. She wouldn’t be a good wife for him. And while he’d be a good father, them together with a child would be repeating history in the worst possible way.

She can’t bring herself to do it.

So she leaves.

First, she drives back to Forks. She grabs dinner for two from the only diner in town. They eat. They have sex. It is intense and desperate and intimate in the way that only goodbye sex can be. Afterwards, laying in bed with her head pillowed on his chest, she tells him about an upcoming gig in San Diego, how the contract is longer term and more money, how she thinks she’ll stick around California for a while and then maybe drive east to NYC after.

He’s silent for a bit, his fingertips running down the length of her back and up again.

He’s perceptive enough to know what she means, to know that this is her goodbye and gracious enough to allow her a peaceful ending.

“It was good while it lasted, yeah?”

She looks up at him and finally meets his eyes.

“Yeah. It was. We good?”

He huffs. “We’re fine Mara. Just – “ he pauses to gather his words.

“Be safe, okay? And don’t be a stranger.”

She smiles at him and it’s her real smile.

It’s the most mature breakup she’s ever had. It’s soiled on her part only because she knows the weight of the secret she’s keeping and knows whenever peaceful conclusion they’ve come to will be shattered once he finds out the truth.

She’s gone by the morning. She leaves his life the same way she entered it.

She does end up in San Deigo for a bit. She spends the rest of winter and the beginning of spring growing round under the California sun. She keeps her word and sends him postcards every couple of months.

She never tells him about the pregnancy, but when she finds out she’s having a baby girl she writes him a song.

It is at once a thank you and an apology. She records it on a shitty tape recorder, writes “Charlie’s song” in black sharpie on a strip of masking tape on the side of the cassette case. She mails it to him the day she starts her cross-country trip to New York. She has a friend there who hung up her dreams of being the next Janis Joplin to move upstate and become a midwife. She’s agreed to help Amara with the birth.

She gives birth to a baby girl at the end of August on an apple orchard in upstate New York. It is at once horribly painful and entirely worth it as she stares down at the small being in her arms. She looks like her. But her eyes, while they are Amara’s shape, are Charlie’s unique color of brown.

Amara names her daughter Lila.

When it comes time to fill out the birth certificate Lila Mara Swan’s father is listed as Charles Swan.

It is – like the tape she sent months ago – both and apology and a thank you for the beautiful baby girl they created together.

It is also a future promise. Amara considered leaving the father’s name blank, but in the end she couldn’t do it. Her daughter is only a few days old but in the back of her mind she knows that if she ever fails or falters and needs someone to pickup the slack, Charlie would be there in a heartbeat. He would step in to pick up the pieces. He is dependable like that and Amara wants some type of legality binding Lila to him.

It will be nearly sixteen years before Charlie Swan learns of his daughter.

Before Lila and Isabella Swan permanently enter his lonely life in Forks, Washington.


End file.
